My name is Isaac Buckley and I am a junior Interactive Arts Major. During the summer of 2016, I was a 2D Art Intern at the small indie game studio in Baltimore, Pure Bang Games. I met the CEO and two of their employees at MICA, during a casual mixer that my professor (Sam Sheffield) organized in order to show off our midterm work. They liked the work that we had done and gave us his card, so I contacted him, did the art test, got an interview, and finally met the team and set up in the internship. I much preferred that method of securing the internship to the chaos of the Career Fair like waiting in a long line and feeling like just another face in a huge crowd of equally disingenuous applicants. This method felt far more organic and natural to me, and I excited to get started.
Pure Bang Games had more than a few indie video games under their belt. There was so much that I didn’t know about the industry – especially from a small studio point of view. In order to make ends meet, they had to carefully balance their personal, long-term projects with client work, which was arguably less interesting and more creatively constrained. The studio had only released games on mobile platforms, mostly out of convenience, but had and were continuously looking for opportunities to expand to consoles and PC. The CEO, Ben Walsh, was my direct supervisor, and his role in the organization ranged from finding client work, making connections, producing, directing, and publishing games.
As a 2D art intern, I designed characters, environments, weapons, mechanical concepts, and game UI (icons, loading screens, effects, etc.). I also practiced taking an asset from concept to game asset in a team setting, receive and apply feedback, and generally improve quality through the iterative process. The project I was involved in was a Clicker genre game where the player fends off hordes of zombies while recruiting survivors. I’m most proud of my ability to adhere to the style that the game was already being made in – I felt that within 2 or 3 days I had gotten the hang of how they did their clean linework and how I could work to make each piece functional as quickly as possible.
My biggest take-away from the experience was bearing witness to an incredible event – the client going bankrupt and pulling out of their contract. This left the studio in a dire strait where everyone was wondering where their next paycheck would come from. Because it was an unpaid internship, I was luckily totally unstressed, but I considered it a beautiful opportunity to witness them all make their plans according to how much money they had and how they could best spend their time until their next contract. It also illustrated the sheer volatile nature of working as a small, independent studio. Although I know a lot about the game industry and game production, my biggest takeaway from this experience was that it is not something that I intend to continue working in if it can be helped, especially the flakey, uncertain, more stressful and admittedly more malleable (in some ways) indie game industry. Either way, I’m proud of the work I did and definitely will be referring to my experiences for quite some time.